That’s why I decided it was time to produce some more content related to keyword research.​ and will be releasing some advanced tutorials in the near future but I wanted to kick this new content spree with a real pro.

Spencer basically does keyword research for living as he has been building his own niche sites for the past 5 years very successfully and his personal success largely relies on his ability to find good keywords to rank for in Google and actually rank for them.

​Spencer did not try to keep any part of his process secret during this interview and truly was a great sharer. It is rare when successful affiliates are so opened about how they make money but Spencer is one of these guys.

If you’re just getting started with keyword research of if you’ve been doing it for years, there is something for you in this incredibly actionable episode of the authority hacker podcast.

Thrive Leads Shortcode could not be rendered, please check it in Thrive Leads Section!

Full Transcript

Gael: Hey guys, welcome to episode to 3 of the Authority Hacker podcast. In this episode, I am welcoming Spencer Haws who is the creator of nichepursuits.com and longtailpro.com. Long Tail Pro is a keyword research tool and Spencer has been very good at creating niche sites making them rank in Google and making passive income from them. So I couldn’t resist on the opportunity to invite him to try and understand how he does keyword research and how he is so successful with it. So, Spencer, thank you so much for joining us. Can you please introduce yourself shortly to our audience?

Spencer: Yes, absolutely, thanks for having me on the podcast. First of all- hey everybody out there, I am always excited to talk about keyword research. My very quick intro is I run the blog over at Niche Pursuits, where I talk about my own business and my background in building lots and lots of niche websites. I have also created the keyword research tool on Long Tail Pro that you mentioned, that I’ve been running for about 3 years. So I build out lots of usually small affiliate sites, although I am moving into building out larger sites now. I’m a blogger, I have a podcast myself, and a couple of other little side projects as well.

Gael: Cool. Well, that’s really good, because a lot of people that are listening to this podcast, they are usually thinking about starting sites or just working on smaller sites and so on and that’s why I am really interested to learn how you do things. So, to get things started, can you just describe how you go about doing keyword research in terms of the basic steps you are taking, what decide to be keywords?

Spencer: It really depends, first of all what type of site you are going to build, ok? So, I mentioned that I built a lots of small, affiliate websites if you will, but now I am building out a little bit more larger authority type websites, so it really depends. First, you need to decide what type of site you are going to be building. And we can go into what the differences are, but just generally speaking for keyword research you are going to want to find a keyword that is one that you can rank for easily in Google. So you need to do a lot of competitor analyses, but it also needs to be a keyword that gets enough search volume, so if it only gets searched for 10 times every month, that is probably not a keyword that is worth targeting. So, that range usually is somewhere between- we can go into maybe what the usuals are in a little bit, but it needs to have enough search volume, and then for the most part you want to target some type of bind keyword or keyword that advertisers are interested in actually being associated with. So that’s kind of a big picture view and I know we are going to get down into the nitty-gritty steps if you will of all those things also.

Gael: Yeah, and to start with one of these steps, you say you need to have enough searches a month, but when you read around for all these SEO blogs and so on, everyone has their own recipe and what is personally your minimum search volume you would ever go for when picking up a keyword, whatever it is.

Spencer: So I’ll give two different answers here. So, one if you are just building out what you plan to be a smaller affiliate website, you know something that maybe you don’t plan on it being a site that is thousands of pages you know, maybe it is just going to be 20 or 30 pages, you are just picking one very small niche. Usually for those types of primary keywords that you are targeting, you want a minimum of probably a 1000 searches a month,. Anywhere between a 1000 to 10 000 is kind of the range for a primary keywords, so the main keyword for your website and kind of the range that works best typically for me is somewhere between 2500 and 7000, something like that. That is where most of the keywords that I find in that particular market. However, if you are out building a larger authority website, believe it or not the search volume can be much less. Because the idea is that you are going be producing hundreds and hundreds pieces of content, maybe thousands and so each keyword doesn’t need to get a 1000 or 5000 searches a month, only I would say 200 is a minimum search volume per month, because once you have a thousands of articles all targeting keywords that only get searched for 200 times a month, that can be a lot of traffic over a lot of content, so it really depends on what your goals are for your website but those are some really rough numbers.

Gael: Ok, I’m mostly running authority sites with a lot of pages these days and one thing that I want to add as well is the way the keyword tool and keyword planner and all the tools that rely on the API that is based on the Google API they give you exact searches for a given keyword, but usually, there is like hundreds of variations, that you will also rank for. And so, we have articles that are officially targeting keyword with like 200, 250 searches a month etc. They still get thousands of visits per month, because especially when you talk about product names for example, in terms of keywords, like there are so many misspellings, or like people add the brand, they don’t add the brand, they add the name of the shop they want to buy it in and so on, and that adds up to thousands of keywords each with very little volume but you are going to rank for all of them, nobody is optimizing for all of them, right?

Spencer: Yeah, that is a really great point, because I mean, that demonstrates the power of the Long Tail. People are out there searching, there may be unique queries that nobody else has searched for, but still, kind of the root thing they are searching for is maybe a phrase match of that smaller keyword that we are targeting. So you are exactly right that you shouldn’t expect only to get a tiny trickle of traffic but by producing lots of content you usually cast this very wide net that can end up capturing all these very long tail keywords that maybe you didn’t even expect to capture, but you just do because you are writing so focused on particular topics.

Gael: Yeah, I mean actually 15% of the queries typed in Google have never been typed in Google before, and most people use it every day, so that’s pretty crazy.

Spencer: It’s pretty impressive, yeah.

Gael: So yeah, there is also Google has this new hummingbird algorithm where they really like look at what they call the web of things rather than the web of keywords, and that means that they are trying to understand what the content is about and as a result, they are much smarter at identifying what you are about and if you are not exactly about that keyword and your content still matches the query, then they will still match you with that query and show you very high and I guess that is why also authority sites are dominating more and more searches because you know, finding keyword is becoming more and more difficult these days, I don’t know if you agree Spencer?

Spencer: Yeah, you know, I do agree with that, and there is a lot of factors why it’s more difficult, but part of it is just that Google values more authoritative sites over all as well and so yep, I agree with that.

Gael: Cool. The next thing I wanted to ask you is how do you go about evaluating the competition in the top ten, like to see if it’s worth it or not, because there is so many metric out there that are not exactly super reliable so I’m thinking for example of page rank that has been updated like 9 month ago right now, and the main authority is kind of — but it’s not really Google so it is kind of how to rely on that and so on. So I’d like to know what you are looking at, basically?

Spencer: Yes, absolutely. So There are number of factors, lot of things that you can look at and we can dive as deep here as you want but and feel free to follow up, but so there is a couple of things that you want to look at. Overall, one is of course relevance. It’s worth mentioning that of course you want to see how relevant the results in Google truly are to the specific keyword that you have typed in. And you know, that’s a more minor thing nowadays, but there still are opportunities where several of the sites ranking on the top page of Google are not truly targeting the keyword, you know, they are not using the entire phrase in their page title or on their page. And so simply by targeting the keyword better you can at list optimize better than they are on page. So look at relevancy of the keyword, then you get into things, you know the off page factors which is where you are going to spend most of your analyses time. I personally look at things like page authority, which again is a Moz metric but the page authority the number of links pointing to that page and to a lesser extent site age, and I don’t really look at page rank to be honest any more. It’s one of those things like you said, Google doesn’t update it quite as much and for various reasons it doesn’t matter quite as much. And then, another big thing that I look at like- there are some things that I like to see in the top ten results on Google. For example I like to see other weak types of sites that are ranking in Google, because that gives me the confidence that I can outrank them and weak types of sites might be forums or answer type sites, like Yahoo answers or other user generated question and answer type sites. Or other small affiliate websites. If there is already an affiliate website ranking in the top ten results on Google for my chosen keyword, that usually gives me some confidence that here is a weaker site typically, and I feel like I can outrank them. So I like to see those other weaker types of sites as well, but yeah, that’s a broad stroke of some of the things that I look at.

Gael: Yeah, that makes sense. Do you look at domain authority at all, because you say page authority, but do you thing domain authority plays a big role in all of this?

Spencer: Yeah, you know, I do look at domain authority and as we are talking about this I actually have Long Tail Pro pulled up which is what I use to analyze the competition and so it does list page authority and domain authority, plus Moz rank and page rank inside the agent and other things. So I do look at domain authority but really page authority is more important because you are trying to outrank that specific page and so you want to know how authoritative that actual page is. So, Amazon of course can have a domain authority I think it’s like 99 you know-

Gael: It’s a 100 now.

Spencer: Is, it? But, they have some small inner pages that are not as strong, they are not something that Amazon is really trying to rank for, they haven’t built links to, and that you can outrank, so that page authority of that particular page is going to be much lower. So page authority is usually more relevant.

Gael: Sure, that makes sense. One thing I’d like to add as well, I’ve shared it on the blog already, but you know when you do the keyword research for these keywords and you find these lower type affiliate sites, so niche sites and so on, what I like doing as well is putting them into SEM rush and there is a free version, right, and you can find all the keywords they rank for, right. And then just start listing everything they rank for, you can find everything they rank in top 3 and just start targeting these keywords if they are monetizable, obviously.

Spencer: That’s a great tip and actually it’s something that I’ve done as well. And I found some great keywords using that method.

Gael: Yeah, you need to combine both- you need to start looking and find these sites and then just reverse engineer them and build a list of keywords. Ok, now I want to talk a little bit about buying 13:25 because it’s very nice to rank for keywords but if you can’t really monetize it’s kind of difficult, so how do you go about matching monetization and keywords when you are doing your research?

Spencer: So you want to make sure that there is a market there. You can’t- I wish I could think of a quick example, but there is so many keywords that people search for maybe a lot all the time but there is no products, there is no advertisers that care at all about this type of keyword. Whatever it is, maybe it’s a celebrity keyword that people type in randomly, looking for information on some famous person. You know, advertisers really don’t care, they are not trying to sell a product. So one thing that I would look at is advertiser competition, and that is provided by the Google keyword planner, it basically tells you how many advertisers there are for particular keyword. And so more advertisers is better, just meaning there is more money spent in the niche, you can look at the CPC if you have a CPC of over a dollar that usually means there is little bit more money being spent there, that sort of thing. So, product based keywords or keywords that have lots of advertisers or by far where you want to focus most of your attention.

Gael: Fair enough. Do you already match how you are going to monetize, like are you maybe already looking for affiliate programs, or like is it just based on CPC and then you figure it out when you start creating the content?

Spencer: I guess it kind of goes hand in hand, I mean really if you find a keyword that kind of matches what I mentioned, is product based or it has a great CPC and advertise or competition, usually there is some way that you can monetize that. It’s usually pretty easy to determine what that might be, whether that’s Google AdSense, or Amazon affiliates, I mean just those two programs cover just about anything you can build a site on, but it’s even better of course if you can find some sort of individual affiliate program that maybe you can sell higher and product at least that you get a higher commission for. So yes I do think about it as I am doing my keyword research and I guess I can internalize that, at this point. Just I know there are certain keywords I just don’t look at because I know there is no way to monetize them, it’s sort of internal to the process I suppose.

Gael: Ok, fair enough. Although, I am going to temper that a bit because we have a site called Health Ambition, that actually has a lot of very informational content, and half of it is very hard to sell anything, actually. But the thing is these keyword get so much traffic, than the AdSense for single pages goes over $300 per page sometimes, per month.

Spencer: And that’s in the health niche?

Gael: Yeah, ok, health is a little bit different I guess.

Spencer: Yeah, I mean health is there is a lot of money being spent in the health niche but your point is well taken though, there is a certain treshold I would suppose at some point where a keyword if it’s getting a huge volume even though there is not any products or lots of advertisers, it may still very well be worth it just because it’s so easy to rank perhaps and the volume of traffic will make up for the sort of low visitor value.

Gael: Yeah, I would only pick that kind of keyword when I see that I am finding the keyword and it’s like over 15 000 searches a month or something, and then like 15 000 to 100 000, it’s like in that range. And then, I put it in Long Tail Pro and I see number of that link 0000000, it happens, you know. When is our informational keywords, very often the pages are crowded with online magazines. So you get your Men’s Health and you get your Prevention Magazine, and a bunch of these big guys. But actually, these individual pages are super weak, right, they are barely shared on social media, they are not really linked to inside the site and so on, so sometimes just putting a piece of content up and doing some internal linking from the rest of your content that has links already, gets you in a top 3, 4 easily.

Spencer: Yep. Absolutely. So there is nothing wrong with that and I will say that I have lots of sites that are targeting more informational products it just kind of depends on the niche and the specific example I guess.

Gael: Yeah. That makes sense. It’s just you really need to either have the intent and you really care that much about the volume actually, or you need to have a bunch of volume and very easy to rank for, pretty much, that’s-

Spencer: Right, yep, I agree.

Gael: And AdSense- even if there is no necessarily- even no product at all, matching the niche, even with things like re-targeting these days, you know, people buy AdSense banners from retargeting, I think on our AdSense account 30% of impressions are retargeting. SO these actually beat against each other and everything even though there is no product matching even as matching your niche as long as there is traffic.

Spencer: Yeah, no it is very interesting so you can still do quite well on what would usually be not a very valuable keyword per se.

Gael: Yeah, I mean that’s how all these buzz feeds and all these sites that post pictures of cats and everything make money; they make money on the advertising on the retargeting an advertising money actually. Because there is no products match but since people have a bunch of retargeting cookies, people that retarget bid against each other and actually people are competing and these get to decency pieces, you know.

Spencer: That makes sense.

Gael: It’s still growing and it’s still in progress but that’s how, that’s why we have so many of these sites and we didn’t have so much like couple of years ago. OK, I want to know as well we found some of these, but I want to know about you, is there like some kind of formulas or structures that consistently are working for you, you know?

Spencer: Yeah, and you kind of mean like a formula for using certain words plus the keyword, or the keyword plus certain words- yeah, you know there are some things, a couple that tend to work well for me, are things like best product name, you know. Or product category if you will, so best hiking boots, or best fishing reels, or something like that. Or, review and reviews after the keyword, those tend to work very well. And another one is keyword plus the word brand. Or actually the word best plus the keyword and then brand, so- I’m trying to think of an example- you know, best microphone brands, or best calculator brands, that’s a decent formula as well. So there is a few that tend to work well for affiliates sites at least.

Gael: Yeah, ok. That makes sense, there is one that kind of like worked out like reverse engineering a lot of affiliate sites and I call it the XOY and it’s basically a lot of people trying to for example like trying to rank for like cleansing cream, and that’s really competitive, really difficult to rank for and it’s also not very targeted because you are going to get the 50 years old woman targeting like a Google and you are going to get a 16 year old girl. And they don’t use the same cream usually.

Spencer: Right.

Gael: And so, what I call the XOY is basically crossing two things, so it could be like best cleansing cream for teenagers, or it could be best cleansing cream for after menopause in the other case, you know. Or whatever you want. And that allows you to not only get keywords that are less competitive and still get some search volume, and at the same time you can really refine your prospect and offer the right product to them which increases your conversion like crazy, you know.

Spencer: Yeah, that’s a really good one actually. And one other one that I thought of is often using price or dollar amount, so, cars under $10 000 or fishing rods under $200, so kind of the under dollar amount is another one that can produce some decent keywords as well.

Gael: Do you go for keywords like cheap and discount and the people that are price shopping a lot-

Spencer: Yeah, sometimes I do. I’ve definitely done some of those before. Sure.

Gael: Ok, it’s like a lot of people are afraid that people that are going to be price shopping and just hopping from one site to the other and not really convert, so is that working for you?

Spencer: Yeah, you know, I don’t think I have any sites that use that as a primary keyword but just on individual articles maybe that are written for that site will target one or two of those keywords and yeah, they can do ok.

Gael: Ok. Fair enough. OK, the next question is- a lot of people are probably talking to you about keyword research, since you have a product around that, and is there something that people consistently worry about that they shouldn’t?

Spencer: Probably. [laugh] Yes, you know, I think people do worry a lot. And, when it comes to keyword research, I think it actually is important to worry some, because it is such an important step; people should be thinking a lot about what keywords they are going to choose. But, just in general, sometimes people over worry, I think that people should just take that- and this is mostly targeted towards people that are maybe building a site for the first time. I think people should just go out and build their first site even if everything isn’t perfect, because the best way to learn something is through experience and that’s how I learned I made all the mistakes in the book myself, but your second site is going to be so much better, so my advice would be to yeah, do your best to do great keyword research but then just don’t stress about all the other little details about is this the perfect keyword. I mean, you can spend months probably analyzing competition but just pull the trigger, go out, build your first site, learn the ropes, make mistakes, and then you’ll probably do better the next time.

Gael: Yeah, I mean, actually, what I tell people usually when they start a site is to actually not worry about keywords at all. I’m very white hat in my approach, and so I tell people to build something people like and just like have people like go on forums, go on Redit, places where they can promote it directly, and build something people like that they are willing to like on Facebook or subscribe via email or that kind of stuff. And by doing that you are kind building some authority to your site because you get links from Redit, you get links from forums, you get links from- you cannot do link building without knowing it, you know. And then once you have a little bit of authority and usually I look at domain authority from Moz, usually that’s kind of the metric I look at. From doing all this promotion, then start creating content that is keyword optimized because unless you do link building on the site, whatever keyword you optimize for most of the time if they are profitable, it’s kind of hard to rank for it on your first site that’s a fresh domain and everything.

Spencer: Right. Those are some great points.

Gael: And the thing is, by the time that you are starting to create keyword optimized content, and you can always go back to your old content and optimize it, right, nobody stops you. But, by the time, you already know your niche pretty well, you already know your competitors pretty well because you are kind of competing with them on forums and Redit and all of that, and you can really easily reverse engineer like you know who are the big guys and who is not, and how they research is sometimes hard to figure out.

Spencer: Absolutely.

Gael: But overall, I agree with you totally on the fact that it’s all about getting started, and then things can be re-optimized later, it doesn’t need to be perfect from the get go. Ok, one thing that’s not exactly keyword research but people that do link building like to know like do you have any kind of anchor ratio that you use to do better for the keywords you are targeting for your pages and how do you go about that in terms of anchor text?

Spencer: It seems like this is an ever moving target, right, back in the day it used to be like 50% of your anchor text would be your keyword.

Gael: Or way more.

Spencer: You would just go crazy with the anchor text and of course Penguin came along and took care of all those types of sites I guess, and so Google made so many updates that you’ve had to change your anchor text to where I am basically at the point now, where I use almost no exact matching anchor text whatsoever. It’s all either phrase match or non keyword matched, you know whether that URL- so I don’t have a specific ratio other than to say almost as little as possible. I try not to use my specific exact match keyword as anchor text.

Gael: Fair enough. That makes sense. I mean, I don’t do any anchor text. What you can do also it’s a hypothesis, that maybe counting is having your keywords somewhere around your link, you know, they call it co occurrence, and they say that Google scans the whole paragraph or something like that and tries to understand the context which would make sense in with the new hummingbird. And then give some relevance based on the whole paragraph and not just the anchor text.

Spencer: That is what we do. We sort of use that so we mention the keywords near our anchor text but not in the anchor text.

Gael: That makes sense. I mean, especially if you start thinking about the anchor text you are doing too much anchor text usually. It’s usually the way it goes. I think it’s more about the quality of the links you can get then the anchor text.

Spencer: Yeah, absolutely, I agree.

Gael: Cool. Now, I know that you have a history of doing niche sites and smaller sites and so on and you said recently on your podcast and on your blog that you are going to build bigger sites. And, everything we talked about, do you think anything is going to change in the way you manage bigger sites or is it going to stay the same?

Spencer: So I am moving toward building out larger authority sites. I got started back in the time when you could- I built my first site in 2005 and I guess people sort of a time frame from 2007 to 2010 I was crancking out these smaller affiliate websites that you could do that, you could rank at the top of Google but now that algorithms have changed, it’s just not quite as easy to do and it makes more sense from a longevity perspective to build out a site that you can have for years to come. Hopefully. And so as far as process change from what I mentioned, the keyword research is still very similar the one sort of change is just the search the volume that I guess I mentioned previously within authority site you don’t have to worry so much about having some minimum volume because the idea is to just have so much content that you make it up in the volume of content and capturing those long tail variations. And to be honest, depending on the site, I don’t do quite as much research for each individual keyword, if that makes sense. So, for the site usually when you layout content, we’ll pick some general categories and certainly some topics that we know we want to rank for, and then other pieces of content is often just related to that to fill out the site more. And so I might do a little bit less keyword research believe it or not on some of these sites just because I know of the power of the long tail.

Gael: Yeah, that makes total sense, and having complimentary pieces just helps you just rank the whole blog right, if you do all these internal linking and so on.

Spencer: Absolutely.

Gael: That’s what we call hubs of content, usually. It works really well for us, as well, we just create a sub category, create a dozen pieces of content, create one free give away for that subcategory that is related to the content so we can get people’s emails, we get 7- 10% opt in rate or something, and then we release the products we want to promote and we also build that into the email list and the reviews and all of that as well, and you build that whole little package that interlink together just does really well, you know.

Spencer: Absolutely, for sure.

Gael: One thing as well for authority site that we’ve noticed is that especially the keywords that we talked about very informational without too much monetization and so on, they can be crazy to build links for you. And I’m going to give an example of a keyword we rank for: so in Health Ambition if you Google it, we rank #2 for benefits of peanut butter. Which is, probably not very easy to sell peanut butter on that page, people just go to their grocery store. But, that page I think gathered over 20 natural links without us doing anything at all. And then we can use that page as a page that we can then link from to all the pages we care more about. One thing to think about is always like what kind of keywords am I going to rank for that are going to generate links for my authority site and that’s been working really well for us so we really divide our content into 2 categories, the content that makes us money and the content that builds authority. And for us so far, it’s worked well and when we build these hubs we try to have half- half usually.

Spencer: Yeah, and that’s a good point and that is something that we are doing as well, not necessarily that we know it’s going to rank in Google and just generate sort of links that way but creating more shareable content. A lot of times when you create content just based on keywords it’s maybe boring, not that exciting, but if you can come up with something that’s very shareable, linkworthy, something that you are willing to outreach to other people and say, hey, we produced this great piece of content, if you can sprinkle a few of those throughout your site it’s a great way like you said to build authority for the site which will hopefully pull up the rest of your keyword based articles if you will.

Gael: Yeah, it really helps. Especially when you start having a little bit of authority to the point where you just post a piece of content there is a good chance it’s going to pop up on page 1 without you doing anything else, it really happens, then it starts really making sense to really not worry about link building at all there is producing that kind of content and letting like social and people pick it up and link to it.

Spencer: Yeah. That’s the idea, hopefully everybody can get to that point where they are just generating those natural links and sharing and everything like that.

Gael: We’ve actually never built a single link to that site. It’s been a good adventure, it’s been like 18 months now, so it’s not brand new but yeah, and the link growth you can say it’s like L shape like it’s really happening but, I mean, we’ve basically replaced the link building budget with content budget, it was a lot of money and content, you know. But yeah, it’s slowly paying off, it’s great to see that. And the beauty of it is, this content is going to keep building links for us, you know, in the future months because it’s still there, you know, and really nice as a model.

Spencer: Yeah, absolutely. Which is encouraging for me, because this is very similar- like I said, I built some larger sites but nothing massive if you will. I’ve kind of gone from the really small sites to a little bit bigger and now Perrin- my coworker that is helping me build out these sites we are developing a strategy and I’ve already started building the site, it’s very similar to what you are doing here, with this site so it is encouraging to see how well you are doing here 18 months on if you will. We know our site, we are in it for the long haul and it’s going to take a long time but-

Gael: It takes a long time, yeah.

Spencer: Yeah, but we hope it does pay off big time.

Gael: Yeah, I mean basically you need to keep going. For us, even the growth was a very L shaped and I actually shared screens just of the analytics before, so I don’t mind like sharing that, but the first six months, to six months we were getting like 500 visits a day or something, it was ok but it wasn’t very big, right? And now we are 18 months in it gets 10 000 visits a day, something like that, it’s really getting big. So the growth is really not linear and you should really just, it’s very minimal at the beginning, I think it took 7 months for us to make our first dollar. Because we didn’t monetize very well either, to be honest. But today, I could pretty much leave all of that site already so it’s pretty cool.

Spencer: Yeah, very cool. Awesome.

Gael: Is there anything about keyword research that we didn’t cover int he interview that’s kind of an essence report of your process that I kind of missed out with the questions?

Spencer: We kind of covered everything in broad strokes. I will just sort of drive the point home at least for what is working well for me, it really is just sort of picking off the weaker competition. I’ve heard from a lot of people that when they do keyword research when they see other affiliate sites already ranking they think, “Oh man, somebody’s already taking the spot. This keyword is gone, I shouldn’t go out in this niche.” But for me, it’s very encouraging to see other affiliates, other individual entrepreneurs that you know, these aren’t big companies, these aren’t big brands that are ranking, and so I will just say that can be a key for anybody that is struggling with keyword research if you find some results with either brand new websites ranking or websites that you clearly can see or just individual affiliate websites, that should be very encouraging and potentially can be a great keyword to go after.

Gael: yeah, I mean, it’s always better to go against these than to go against big brands, seeing the direction Google is taking if you still see people like that on the first page then you have a good chance usually. But you would be surprised I’ve targeted keywords sometimes out if negligence of proper keyword research, and then I look at like you know, two weeks later after the content was up, I was like, “Oh my God, why did I target that.” Like, that was really stupid. And surprisingly, it just popped up on top you know, it just drove an enormous amount of traffic so there are some like food supplements names that we rank for that are in the several hundreds of thousands of searches per month, right. And that’s the thing that everyone is striving for. And still, these pages get like 400, 500, 600 visits per day, which is a pretty good place to be when it’s like specific supplement type keywords and stuff. I was like I shouldn’t have targeted that but- sometimes you get lucky, you know.

Spencer: Yeah, absolutely. That’s always good.

Gael: All right, so I guess that’s basically that for that interview. So if you guys want to check out Spencer’s site I will be linking to it in the blog post, with the show notes it’s going to be authorityhacker.com/podcast3, and I am also going to link to a Long Tail Pro if you want to try it out, there is a free trial so there will be a link there, it’s a really good keyword tool, it’s good when you just start as an affiliate because so many of these tools are like requiring payments and so on it just really adds up when you run your sites, you know. So that what we really like about Long Tail Pro. So, if you want to check it out, check it out, and otherwise we’ll see you in next episode. Thank you very much, Spencer.

Spencer: Thanks a lot, it’s been great being on.

Thank you for listening to the Authority Hacker podcast. If you liked this episode, don’t forget to rate us on iTunes and we’ll give a shout out in the next episode. If you want more, 100% free niche marketing tutorials and hacks, head over to authorityhacker.com.

What do you think about EMD and PMD ? I have seen many people saying EMD does not work anymore, they are saying EMD does not help on SEO anymore from now and beyond and is best to use a brand name domain, this is it true ?